Monday, 13 June 2011

The race for the most disastrously stupid energy policy - UK overtakes Germany

This video pretty well shows where David Cameron is heading with his windmill policy ....

There seems to be a competition going on between governments in Europe about who has the most outrageously expensive and stupid "green" energy policy. Just when everybody was thinking Angela Merkel´s Germanteam was in the lead, it was overtaken by the UK team, led by its incomparable captain David "Muppet" Cameron.

The Daily Mail´s Richard Littlejohn explains the secrets of the Cameron "success" story:

Following the revelation that we’re all paying a secret stealth tax to subsidise so-called renewable energy sources, it seems like a good time to check out exactly what we are getting for our money.At midday yesterday, wind power was contributing just 2.2 per cent of all the electricity in the National Grid. You might think that’s a pretty poor return on the billions of pounds spent already on Britain’s standing army of windmills.

But it’s actually a significant improvement on the last time I checked the wholesale electricity industry’s official website. At the turn of the year, the figure was 1.6 per cent. During the cold snap the turbines had to be heated to stop them freezing and were actually consuming more electricity than they generated.Even on a good day, they rarely work above a quarter of their theoretical capacity. And in high winds they have to be turned off altogether to prevent damage. Britain’s 3,426 wind turbines produce no more electricity than a single, medium-sized gas-fired power station.Any sane individual would conclude that wind generation is hopelessly inefficient and horriblyexpensive and stop throwing good money after bad.But when did sanity ever have anything to do with government policy?

Ministers are planning to install another 12,500 of these worse-than-useless windmills, some of them up to three times the size of existing monstrosities.We are paying for all this through hidden charges which now make up a fifth of all gas and electricity bills. The average household has to fork out an extra £200 a year.That’s because the Government forces energy companies to buy from renewable sources, which are far more expensive than conventional power stations. The cost is then passed on to the consumer.Ministers know there would be an outcry if they raised taxes to pay for windmills, so they hide the subsidies in our gas and electricity bills and hope the energy companies get the blame.
---Earlier this year the National Grid was forced to pay £900,000 compensation to the owners of six wind farms which were forced to close down one especially gusty night — because they were producing too much electricity and there was no capacity to store it.So they’re either producing little or no electricity, or else have to be switched off because they’re producing too much. Either way, we pay.

And here is James Delingpole´s take on the Cameron team´s achievements:

"Never before in history, I doubt, has so much money ever been squandered, so much suffering and poverty exacerbated, so much economic damage been inflicted, so many lies promulgated and so much environmental destruction wrought in order to deal with a problem so microscopically miniscule. Really, if Barack Obama were to declare war on Belgium because he’d always found Tintin Au Congo offensively racist, or if David Cameron were to launch a nuclear strike on Mykonos because all those white-painted buildings were “way too gay”, you still wouldn’t be even half way close to equalling the quite breathtaking stupidity, purblind ignorance and suicidal wrongheadedness of the disasters currently being inflicted on the world by our boneheaded political and administrative classes on their holy mission to “combat climate change.”Read the entire article here